How Many Laws?
Modern Law and the Bible
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and investigate them from different perspectives and disciplines to come up with unique insights and solutions.
Today's topic follows up on a previous essay where we explored the structure of Biblical Law. There, I promised to investigate just how many of the Biblical laws we still follow.1 This essay is another dip into Systems Thinking applied to Theology and how, by stepping back, we can improve the context and better understand what’s actually going on.
Introduction
This is the fourth religious investigation we’ve done here on Polymathic Being. Each of the following three provides background and interesting investigations but they aren’t required to understand today’s topic.2
Religion as a Psychology explores how everyone is religious, even atheists.
Exegesis: A Powerful Analytical Tool, uncovers what we mean by the law, commandments, and judgments in the Bible.
Not So Idolatrous is a fun perspective on the classic story of The Golden Calf.
I find religion to be a fantastic application of Systems Thinking because so much our our culture, history, and governmental structures are rooted in a Judeo-Christian tradition. It’s also fascinating because of just how much we get wrong within theology.
For example, within Protestant churches, their doctrine and teaching challenge the Catholic doctrine that emphasizes works, or actions, to maintain the faith.3 The Catholic church had started to use the Biblical Law as a cudgel to extract money from parishioners through the sale of indulgences. This was the practice of being able to buy forgiveness for violating the rules.
Martin Luther ignited the Protestant Reformation in 1517 to push back on the corruption of the church. In their protest, the Protestant tradition shifted away from any action believers could take and over-indexed to a doctrine of salvation by grace alone.
Long story short, the general Christian theme states that followers of the Biblical God were never able to follow the law or Torah that was handed down. Common doctrine accepts that it wasn’t possible to keep the Law and that God’s objective was to show people they couldn’t so they would look for salvation, not works.
On the surface, I don’t think this is a good look. First off, as we’ll see below, we still follow the majority of the laws. Second, what kind of God creates capricious laws he knows aren’t needed, forces people to follow them all to prove they can’t, and then sacrifice his son to die on the cross to provide the salvation he already gave them prior to the law of Moses, and then just gets rid of them all?4
That was the mind tangle I found myself in when I investigated all this a decade ago. This essay isn’t an argument for or against a biblical religion but an investigation into the cultural and political impact that religion has on society and specifically how we accept doctrines without digging deep enough into them.
What Is The Law?
A quick recap on terms that we’ll use here is as follows from the Hebrew that we covered previously in the essay, Exegesis: A Powerful Analytical Tool:
Torah = Law, better seen as instructions in being righteous
The Torah of the Bible’s Old Testament is best understood as instructions or guideposts towards living what is deemed as a righteous life. It borrows heavily from the older Code of Hammurabi and includes both Commandments and Statutes (laws) and Judgements or ‘Right Rulings’ dealing with the consequences of violating the commandments.
The Jewish Sage Mammonides reckons from the Torah that 613 Mitzvah constitute the entirety of the prescribed rules. These break down into several categories:
Basic Principles of Faith and Morals
Temple Rules and Sacrificial Rules
Damages and acts of violence
Penalties for robbery, theft, bearing false witness
Special Occasions like holidays
Purity rules like food, cleaning, and more.
At first blush, 613 rules aren’t that many. You have to follow significantly more than this just to drive a car in Arizona! Even crazier, it’s not possible to do a quick search for how many laws exist in the United States but rough estimates suggest over 4,300 laws and more than 90,000 federal rules and regulations exist.5
613 rules begin to sound pretty reasonable in comparison and this number further reduces when we analyze how many of them don’t apply today such as:
Not to sell a Hebrew maid-servant to another person (Ex. 21:8)
To carry out the ordinance of the Red Heifer so that its ashes will always be available (Num. 19:9)
That houses sold within a walled city may be redeemed within a year (Lev. 25:29)
Rules for Priests and Levites (a tribe of Isreal in charge of the temple)
The ones that no longer apply are typically rules overcome by history, temple rituals, and traditions that don’t occur today. Taking these out reduces the laws from 613 down to around 366 which is an even more tractable number.
For those interested in the spreadsheet I built to track this, you can find it here:
How much of the Bible law do we follow?
Now that we’ve got the proper context, we can compare the laws that remain to our current legal and cultural rules. I organized the remaining 366 laws by those covered by National and State laws (do not murder or steal, etc.), then by Church Rules (monotheism, adultery, etc.), and by Culture. (we don’t eat snakes, dogs, etc.)
What I found was that we generally follow 243 of the 366 applicable laws. What’s left that Western Culture writ large doesn’t follow6 revolves around only three main topics:
7th day Sabbath (and we don’t even know when the 7th day actually is anymore)
Biblical holidays (but they’ve created their own)
Eating Biblically clean (but mainly around pork and shellfish, not dogs and horses)
Put a different way, we follow the vast majority of the commandments, even those that some have told me are ‘crazy’ like putting a railing around your roof (The international building code requires this on a flat roof where people can walk) and covering a hole so nothing falls in. (required by OSHA law today)
Even the holidays are a close miss with Christians still observing roughly four of the seven but replacing others with Christmas and Easter.
Separating Oral from Written Law
I should also point out that a complication to the analysis is the difference between the Torah (written law) and the Talmud (oral law). Concepts like Kosher come from the Talmud which bans cheeseburgers (milk mixed with meat).
In the Torah, this comes from the priestly code and is a sacrificial restriction of not boiling a young goat in its mother’s milk because that was a pagan fertility ritual. The Talmud put a broader fence around this just to be sure and now requires 6 hrs between eating milk and eating meat to ensure there isn’t a mixture anywhere.
The rules that the Orthodox Jews follow are the Biblical Law PLUS the Oral traditions and the Talmud. This is something Peter faced in Acts 10: 9-19 when he’s commanded to go to a Gentile’s home which is against the Talmud. God corrects Peter saying, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”
The Jews at the time believed that even associating with a Gentile made themselves unclean. Tradition took this even further where they wouldn’t even eat a lamb held in the same pasture as a pig. They had built additional rules that were preventing them from ministering to Gentiles.
Lest we continue thinking the vision refers to food, we only need to keep reading down to Acts 10:28 where Peter interprets the vision himself!
“[Peter] said to them: “You are well aware that it is against our law [Talmud] for a Jew to associate with or visit a Gentile. But God has shown me that I should not call anyone impure or unclean.”
Even today, our dietary habits largely follow the Biblical tradition with the major exceptions of pork and shellfish7 and the minor exceptions that most consider exotic like alligators, snails, or dogs.
Summary
So why should you care about this topic? Because it applies the Polymathic Mindset and Systems Thinking tools to theology and provides a great case study for how we can break down non-theological topics. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding today that is rooted in a bit more of an intentional redefinition.
Protestants are correct that the Bible says you cannot earn your way to heaven. However, the commandments aren’t there to earn your way. They exist to guide us toward living a righteous life. Back to Exegesis: A Powerful Analytical Tool:
Torah is the overarching concept best understood as instructions. It is derived from the root, yareh that was used in the realm of archery meaning to shoot an arrow in order to hit a mark. This means that Torah is guidance to aim the arrow at the mark.
These instructions have also weathered the test of time where over 100 of the 366 that currently apply are enshrined in the laws of Western Nations. Churches typically enforce another 134 and 47 are culturally followed. Already over 2/3s of the biblical laws that apply are currently observed in Western Culture.
That’s a testament to the importance of many of these rules for general societal ethics, health, safety, and welfare when the only ones that aren’t followed are slightly niche and often esoteric. Since these laws also form the foundation of much of our culture it behooves us to understand them just a bit better.
As an aside, did you know that the Biblical laws understood germ theory thousands of years before Ignaz Semmelweis instituted handwashing in 1847 after touching dead bodies? Let’s just say had Europeans continued to obey the cleanliness laws, hundreds of thousands of women and children wouldn’t have died in childbearing. I plan to investigate this in a future essay this year.
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I didn’t even consider this is being released on Easter Sunday but I think that’s somewhat apropos since some Christians say that Jesus died so we no longer have to follow the law.
Yes this is hyper-simplified and there is more nuance but that’s been explored in theology and is not germane to this analysis.
I’m not discrediting the symbolism behind the death and resurrection in this statement either. That concept is super deep and worth its own essay for what we can learn from it.
Some measures put this even higher at 300,000 federal crimes through regulation
There are some very esoteric rules that I counted as applicable and are largely followed but not in the same method. For example, laws for the poor and unfortunate such as rules for harvest allowing people to glean food. While we don’t expressly follow this we do follow the spirit of the law with Food Banks, and the US Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. There are others like this but they are mostly cultural.
There are actually very good reasons to not eat Pork and Shellfish. Simply put, both carry a ton of toxis, pigs because they eat trash and shellfish because they are sea-based wastewater filters.
of course, you made a spreadsheet. this is a great read, and I can hear people say "Oh the Bible doesn't affect me" or "It's just a book of myths"
thanks for doing the research
Religion as a Psychology explores how *nearly* everyone is religious, even atheists.
Ahhh, so much better!